Alexander Maedche wrote:
>With respect to ontology editors we
>were confronted with the problem that
>each ontology modeling tool implements
>its own "specific data model", typically
>focusing on a specific representation
>paradigm. Thus, this results in the fact
>that it is impossible that one just
>takes a specific tool and uses it as
>a frontend for some specific backend
>software. Thus, the only thing that works
>is to provide import/export facilities.
>In our case we provide an import tool for
>Protege-based ontologies and RDFS ontologies
>in general.
>
That is certainly true; however lamentable. Lamentable because our
tools do not seem to be able to share the higher level programming
resources simply because of the plethora of data models designers are
allowed to choose from. Lisp was great, it gave us a common data model,
we were able to share many programming resources. However, Lisp did
not seem to have enough restraints on the many ways we can represent
knowledge, we still have too many choices if we want our tools to share
methods. But I think there is a structure that does have enough
restraints for our purposes. It's just labeled directed graphs. I've
been playing around with these for some time [1], they seem to work.
Note that attempting to integrate the data model with a semantic model
theory will just give us more choices and more bickering between
designers and gets the logicians involved too. So ... why not just not
do that .... ? There can be very little bickering about what a labeled
directed graph is. The semantic model theories naturally factor into
the vocabulary of the arc labels; logicians can continue to bicker
about which logics apply to which classes of arc labels , and
programmers can have a structure to share with that is independent of
all of those quibbels.
[1] http://robustai.net/mentography/Mentography.html
Seth Russell